Sunday, February 12, 2017

POLITICAL PRIORITIES: HOW CAN YOU KEEP THEM STRAIGHT?

Keeping priorities straight is
difficult when you're faced with constant distraction. Priorities help you *focus
on what's most important and *get the most important things done.

Here's a friendly reminder about
organizing your priorities, and a list of mine.

The new administration has been in office for less than 30 days. The patterns
they showed on the campaign trail remain: avoid important issues using
distraction and misdirection. The constant stream of ridiculous tweets and even the Muslim travel ban are
examples of this.

How can YOU stay focused on the most important issues in the face of this
constant clamor? The answer's something my parents attempted to teach me when I
was young - too young to appreciate their wisdom: Keep A List.

There is something magical about a written, ordered list. Writing it lets you
refer to it later. Giving it priority lets you find the most important things
first. Ordered lists are at the center of pretty much every single 'Getting It Done' self-help article.

PRIORITIZING POLITICAL ISSUES

Here's my prioritized list of political issues to focus on in the current
administration, and a note about why I have this order:

1. Address global
climate change (as much as possible)

Each day that
passes without addressing Climate Change make the consequences worse and makes
recovery take longer.

2. Boost the economic welfare of the lower and middle classes (rural and urban)

The
basic force driving national division is economic. I think this underlies
differences in understanding about race relations, education, immigration and
even climate change. Boosting the welfare of the majority of the citizens will
help to re-unite our very divided nation.

3. Secure civil liberties

Civil
liberties are self-evident. Our understanding of
these truths has evolved over time - it's not enough for all men to be created
equal, all *people* are created equal. Securing these basic rights for citizens
is incredibly important when our leadership seems interested in degrading them.
Here's an easy test to tell when things are headed in the right direction: the
racial makeup of annual arrests matches the racial makeup of our citizens.
Right now there’s a significant discrepancy.

Our
best approach to remaining important is through an educated population.
Education will also go a long way towards resolving our national
divisions.

5. Make healthcare available and affordable for all (special focus on family
planning).

It's
a national shame that people go without treatment because it costs them too
much. It costs our society far more (explain how) than treating them
would.

6. Stabilize global boundaries and economics (w/ a focus on improving the lives
of the poorest)

Wars
start when countries change their boundaries (or more correctly change the
boundaries of other countries). Peace benefits the world. It's in
our national interest to keep the world peaceful by helping to stabilize
national boundaries and grow the economies of the nations inside those
boundaries.

Extra
credit: Space exploration. I'd love to have the headroom to put this higher on
the list. It scares the bejesus out of me that the actual smartest person alive thinks we need
to diversity our planetary domain in order to survive as a species. But... it’s
hard to argue. Maybe we can knock a few off the list above and get to work on
this one.

A FEW NOTABLE EXCLUSION

We do not need to spend time or money further securing ourselves from
terrorism. There have been only 112 deaths from terrorism in the United States
from 2005-2015. Each was tragic, but each of the 15,000 homicides we had in
just one of those years was equally tragic.

Isolating ourselves from the world should not be a priority. To the contrary, I
believe openness has economics, morality and history on its side. Cutting
ourselves off is not the way to lead the world to peace.

I hope this is a helpful list for you. If you disagree with the items or the
order I'd love to hear about it, I'm open to learning new things and happy to
discuss.

Guest blogger Dave Reeck is a Seattle resident
and a graduate of Lewis and Clark College, Portland, OR. Dave is the son of
proud parents, Darrell and Lucy Reeck.

Fred Phelps ' entourage of hatred came to quiet, small town Ellensburg, Wash., in the spring of 2004. I witnessed the event as interim p...

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